Ray Comfort Stumps the Atheists

We came upon an amazing press release issued by the Christian Newswire, which describes itself as “the nation’s leading distributor of religious press releases.” This one is titled Atheism Destroyed with One Scientific Question. You know we had to take a look. It says:

Filmmaker Ray Comfort, whose movies have been seen by millions, claims to destroy atheism with one scientific question, which he reveals in a new movie called “The Atheist Delusion.”

This is big news! Let’s read on:

Comfort, cohost of the award-winning television program “The Way of the Master,” said regarding atheists’ assertions that there is no God, “Having to point out the existence of the Creator is like having to point out the sun at noon on a clear day.”

No one denies the existence of the sun. There must be more to Comfort’s movie than that. The press release quotes Comfort again:

[A] popular skeptic adage is ‘Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,’ and thanks to modern science we have that extraordinary evidence. Outspoken atheists such as Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins say that they would believe in God if there was scientific evidence. This movie calls their bluff.

Amazing! Let’s read on:

Comfort explained that he made the movie after taking a camera to Southern California universities and asking atheists a scientific question that he’d never asked atheists before. “To my astonishment, those who were open to reason changed their minds about the existence of God in minutes,” Comfort claims.

The press release doesn’t reveal Comfort’s question, so we looked around and found what seems to be a 13-minute excerpt from the movie here on YouTube. He asks several students for “observable evidence of evolution.” When they start to talk about evidence from millions of years ago, Comfort interrupts them and says we can’t observe what happened back then. Some of the students appear to get flustered. The whole movie appears to be several of those edited interviews. But we didn’t see anyone who seemed to change his opinion about God.

Our last excerpt is from the end of the press release:

Follow a number of atheists as they go where the evidence leads and display an honesty that is rarely seen on film.” Comfort said, “The movie reveals what every atheist prays he will never find.”

Here’s the official trailer on YouTube. It’s rather chaotic and painful to watch, but it’s only 90 seconds long. Have fun.

In the video, this dynamic evangelist shows atheists a colorful book and starts with a simple question—do you think the pages and ink could ever fall together to produce the words and pictures on this book? From that starting point Ray shows the foolishness of the religion of atheism and helps the young people he speaks with to come to the realization that their atheism is not based on an intellectual position but a heart issue. It’s a powerful film!

Thankfully it was only 90 seconds; don’t have a clue as to what the banana man is trying to show. There were a lot of things that were not observed yesterday, but with a bit of evidence gathering, logic and reasoning skills, we can pretty much confirm that many things that were not observed actually did happen 🙂

It is true, unfortunately, that many people think that the evidence for evolution is mostly the fossil record. Indeed, many people think that evolution is only something that happened long ago.
(Alas, many people think that evidence for heliocentrism is that one can see the motion of the Earth from interplanetary rockets. I wonder what most people would offer as evidence for atoms. How many people think that Columbus proved that the Earth is round?)

In the video, this dynamic evangelist shows atheists a colorful book and starts with a simple question — do you think the pages and ink could ever fall together to produce the words and pictures on this book? From that starting point Ray shows the foolishness of the religion of atheism and helps the young people he speaks with to come to the realization that their atheism is not based on an intellectual position but a heart issue. It’s a powerful film!

In the video, this dynamic evangelist shows atheists a colorful book and starts with a simple question — do you think the pages and ink could ever fall together to produce the words and pictures on this book?

He’d be better off sticking to bananas. That has to be one of the weakest pro-creationiam arguments I’ve come across. I imagine his interviewees’ “embarrassment” was much like that of David Silverman’s when Bill O’Liarly started talking about the inexplicable miracle of the tides: stark disbelief that someone could be so stupid.

We can’t observe the electrons’ motions in the progress of a message across the net.
We can’t observe the center of the exoplanet Draugr, but we know that there is a center.
We can’t observe all of the zeros of an arbitrary polynomial of degree googol.
We don’t know what it would look like to observe a non-natural event.
We can observe evolution taking place.

[A] popular skeptic adage is ‘Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,’ and thanks to modern science we have that extraordinary evidence.

What scientific evidence? A question about a colorful book? Really?

The problem with “scientific evidence” proving creation is that the same evidence would have to paradoxically disprove the science which produced it. For example, for Comfort’s creation myth to be true, then:

The science of physics cannot be true, including such fundamental (observable) facts such as rates of radioactive decay and the speed of light.

Almost all we know from the science of geology cannot be true.

Everything we know from the science of paleontology cannot be true.

Much of what is known from the study of archeology cannot be true.

The descendant relationships between organisms revealed through the study of DNA, including the determination of the molecular clock, cannot be true.

(I’m sure I’ve missed a few)

Finally, for Comfort’s belief to be true, which is based on the creation myth of a relatively small group of ancient people living in the near east, the creation myths of the rest of the world’s peoples must be false. (Many of those various peoples, BTW, left artifacts and other evidence of their existence from well before 4004 BC.) Since Comfort’s own belief negates the validity of any science that could be used to counter those other creation myths, how can he objectively argue that any one of them is not true.

You might enjoy it at the time, but then there are two possibilities: 1) Comfort’s film has no reference to you or your answer, or 2) Comfort or his associates edit together bits of what you said so that you say whatever Comfort wants you to have said.